WATCH LIVE: SpaceX's Falcon 9 Launch and INSANE Ocean Rocket Landing

If all goes well, SpaceX will attempt an ambitious vertical ocean landing following a mission that will launch currently scheduled for 4:43 p.m. ET today. Watch live coverage here beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET.

Back in December, Elon Musk's SpaceX made history when it successfully conducted a vertical landing of its Falcon 9 rocket (see the amazing footage below). That landing—the first successful vertical touchdown of a rocket from orbit—took place on a landing pad in Cape Canaveral. Today, the private rocket company will attempt a far more ambitious return. For the sixth time, SpaceX will attempt an upright landing onto a floating sea barge.

Today's flight is scheduled to take off from Cape Canaveral at 4:43 p.m. ET, barring any weather-related or mechnical trouble. You can watch live coverage below, which will begin streaming at 3:30 p.m. ET.

Aside from the ambitious re-entry attempt, today's unmanned mission will deliver supplies to the International Space Station. While resupplying the ISS is important and all, let's be honest, the REAL cool stuff will happen after reaching orbit.

Once in orbit, the Falcon 9 rocket will depart from its payload-bearing Dragon spacecraft and send it on its way to the space station. Next, the 14-story-tall first-stage booster will use its remaining fuel to reenter the Earth's atmosphere en route to touchdown onto an unanchored "droneship" in the middle of the Atlantic (dubbed "Of Course I Still Love You"). This is no easy task.

As mentioned earlier, SpaceX has already successfully managed safe returns on land-based targets, so why even bother with these unecessarily tricky sea-landings? One of the chief reasons is that it's good practice. Sea-based landings will almost certainly be necessary for future missions when vessels returning from farther celestial destinations (the moon, Mars, or beyond) return to Earth at high velocities.

A sea landing provides a larger safety barrier, should the rocket wander off course. At these velocities, if it is off even a little bit, it could land miles away, and we don't want that happening anywhere around people.

To be sure, there are no easy parts of today's mission. SpaceX's engineers are attempting to stabilize a building-sized rocket as it goes to battle with the atmosphere (if you recall Felix Baumgartner's chaotic, spintastic space jump from 2013, you get a sense of some of the forces the rocket will be facing). The SpaceX team likens stabilizing the rocket to "trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm." And then keep in mind that the unanchored platform is itself a moving target that will shift and shimmy with the ocean waves.

As of now, SpaceX has yet to make a successful ocean barge landing. The first verticle sea landing test took place in January 2015 when a Falcon 9 rocket successfully made impact with the drone ship (an impressive piece of navigation in and of itself), however it hit its landing a bit too hard and met its fiery end, as you can see in Vine below (turn on the audio for the full effect):

A series of almost-made-it attempts followed over the next few months. Back in June, SpaceX suffered a huge setback when one of its unmanned Falcon 9 rockets exploded two minutes into its flight on its way to the International Space Station. Following a months-long break to reevaluate its operations, the company recommenced verticle landings in January. Today's mission marks SpaceX's first return to ISS resupply duty.

It's All About Trying to Make Space Happen So, why go through all this trouble to bring a rocket back to Earth at all? It's all about making affordable and routine space travel a reality. Previous generations of rockets were designed to burn up during re-entry. SpaceX has designed its rockets to not only survive re-entry, but to be easily salvageable and reused. If these giant rockets can be more than one-flight stands, this would bring down the cost of space travel considerably.

Right now, it costs around $2,000 to send a pound of anything into space, and SpaceX hopes that reusable stages will bring that price down below $1,000.

Even if this groundbreaking (seriously, no pun intended) landing doesn't work, Musk and Co. are dedicated to the reusable rocket concept and will continue to make attempts throughout the year.

We are living in a time with an ever-widening field of players are joining the space game, including Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rocket company, which recently acheived a vertical rocket landing from sub-orbit. And more competition can only be a good thing—they will all learn from each other, build on one another's innovations, and hopefully propel our species far into space where it should have been long ago.

About the Author

Evan Dashevsky served as a features editor with PCMag and host of live interview series The Convo. He could usually be found listening to blisteringly loud noises on his headphones while exploring the nexus between tech, culture, and politics. Follow his thought sneezes over on the Twitter (@haldash) and slightly more in-depth diatribin' over on th... See Full Bio

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